Zulu4 said:
Good job.
Do all the plastic parts just pry off ? Or is it necessary to remove the horn push to remove them ?
Thank you BabyTiger for inspiring me to do this job.
So to answer my own question, it was necessary with my steering wheel, to remove the horn push / airbag to get to the plastic parts. As I have flappy paddles, these had to come off too.
It was all fairly straight forward. Disconnected the battery. Used the many youtube guides to remove the airbag with a screwdriver, then unscrewed the torx bolts at the rear of the wheel (2 for the lower trims and 1 each side for the buttons). The paddles had their own torx bolts. Unfortunately my plastic parts have become quite brittle so a number of tabs just fell off and I ended up using gorilla glue to try to fix some back on.
Rubbing off the old soft touch layer takes quite a bit of time. I tried using a Dremel to try to speed things up but I found there was a danger of cutting into the plastic with it. In the end I used 180 grit wet & dry to get it off, then 240, then 400 to finish. Then primed and satin black finish. It took me the best part of a day to do.
I clumsily managed to snap the earth wire from one of the connectors when I stupidly dangled the airbag from the cables, so repairing that took some time (seen in second photo).
Some random photos to help visualise behind the airbag:
